@disability @academicchatter

(2/?) Hundreds of people started contacting UC decisionmakers using our tool and initially the UC folks panicked and some chancellors actually responded...with lies.

But most chancellors did not respond at all to us or those who'd contacted them using our tool.

When press would ask them, they'd send a paid-by-the-taxpayer PR flack to mouth blah blah at them.

What they did behind the scenes (as we heard from folks on the inside) was to approach disabled student groups who were not activist, not aspirational, to try to look as if they cared, but to maintain the hegemons' modus operandi - continue taking public dollars to funnel to ableist priorities while trying to fund their bare minimum accessibility responsibilities through student fees and crowdfunding.

BUT they put disability on the Regents' agenda for the first time in 10 years! (And did not mention the part our work played in that...funny that).

#UCAccessNow #ADA34 #HigherEd #Ableism

@disability @academicchatter (3/?) They put together a Disability Working Group, which UC Access Now was not invited to and whose part in stimulating the creation of was not acknowledged. We know at least one of the people on this working group was disabled, experienced, and would have been a strong advocate.

But all that seems to have happened is an announcement in Nov of 2023 by President Michael Drake that a Office of Disability Rights would be created and put under a new system-wide Office of Civil Rights. He did not announce what its job would be nor whether actual disability advocates and activists would be hired. The press did not follow up asking him this.

Nothing much happened until the UCOP website reflected change in Spring of 2024 (almost 4 years post-Demandifesto!). It was a small incomplete page for the new office. No mission statement that had to do with accessibility & inclusion or even rights. It was all about "compliance".

#UCAccessNow #ADA34 #HigherEd #Ableism

@disability @academicchatter (4/?) There are many ways I could point to UC doing the same unethical and illegal stuff and being concerned primarily about CYA and smokescreen PR bullshit.

However, although UC has tried throughout to bury UC Access Now's role in stimulating at least a reaction and feeling the need to pretend to be moving, folks on the inside of UC have let us know backchannel that it is OUR activism and the aspirational vision put forth in the Demandifesto that has resulted in any positive change at all.

When we started in June 2020, we never saw UC using alt text and rarely saw any captions (and then usually only auto-captions). This was even after UC Berkeley was sued years earlier for putting videos without captions up on YouTube!

We started hammering them constantly on Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media, keeping receipts and letting folks know. Now you much more frequently see alt text & captions from them - they never mentioned our work.

#UCAccessNow #ADA34 #HigherEd #Ableism

@disability @academicchatter (5/?) (They still need to learn about audio descriptions, too.)

The catalyst (not the only ableism, but the spark) for the formation of UC Access Now was the inaccessible cycle racks on campus.

Initially, UC Davis Taps wanted to treat it like "special needs" and jackhammer a special "blue badge" accessible rack each time a disabled cyclist needed to stop at a certain building. Enormously expensive and not equitable. Quite silly, really.

We kept fighting.

UC Davis now has 3 pilot installations of more accessible rack types. It was not done in cooperation with us, but in reaction to our work. https://daviswiki.org/UC_Access_Now

#UCAccessNow #ADA34 #HigherEd #Ableism @fedibikes